North Korea said yesterday that uranium enrichment and construction of a
nuclear power-plant was “progressing apace”, increasing concerns that the
country is working to build an atomic weapon.

A foreign ministry statement added that North Korea had a sovereign right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and that “neither concession nor compromise should be allowed”.

It accused the United States and its allies of “groundlessly” taking issue with the North’s peaceful nuclear activities. They are “deliberately laying a stumbling block in the way of settling the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula through dialogue and negotiations,” it said.

The timing of the announcement came as Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, left South Korea. There she marked a year since an artillery attack by soldiers of the North on a front-line South Korean island that killed four people.

North Korea has been building a light-water reactor at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex since last year. Such a reactor is ostensibly for civilian energy purposes, but it would give the North a reason to enrich uranium. At low levels, uranium can be used in power reactors, but at higher levels it can be used in nuclear bombs.

It has already revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment facility that could give it a second route to manufacture nuclear weapons, in addition to its existing plutonium-based programme which resulted in the test of an explosive device in 2006.